By Wilhelmina Baird First Published: 1995 In order to avert imminent war, the Earth’s government agrees to negotiate with alien invaders. The military’s representative is Swordfish, a veteran of the Third Alien War. A delegation travels to meet the aliens–an enemy whose nature no human being will ever truly know or trust again.
By Wilhelmina Baird First Published: 1996 The human race has reached the next level of thought transference development in a world where reality can be easily manipulated and turmoil is a way of life. A place where symbiotes have delivered humankind to the next phase of telepathic evolution. A place where reality is flexible. And chaos is the norm.
By Wilhelmina Baird First Published: 1993 Two years after taking part in a cyber-film to make enough money to leave Earth–a film that left their friend Dosh dead and them fleeing for their lives–Cass and Moke return to uncover the truth about the tragedy.
By Wilhelmina Baird First Published: 1993 “Cass, Moke, and Dosh do not know what they are getting themselves into when they sign a contract to star in a cyber-cinema film, which enables audiences to plug into the star’s emotions.” Dosh has sold his good looks once too often to rough customers. He’s so desperate to get off the planet and start a new life that…
By Michael Marshall Smith First Published: 1994 It’s not what you’ve done that counts it’s what you remember… If you could sell your conscience, could you get away with murder? Hap Thompson works the gray area between truth and lies. He works for REMtemp, taking on other people’s memories. It’s illegal, but usually harmless. Maybe a petty criminal wants to pass a lie detector test.…
By Michael Marshall Smith First Published: 1994 Call him Stark. If you have to. If you’re lucky, you won’t call him at all. Because if you do, it means you’ve got trouble. Big trouble. And the problem is that before Stark is done fixing something, a whole lot of other things usually get broken. Like laws and lives—and anyone who gets in the way. It’s…
By Melissa Scott First Published: 1998 In The Shapes of Their Hearts, a computer tape of the brain of a religious prophet has been allowed to merge with an AI; the result is both a religious icon on the planet Idun and a powerful terrorist. Anton Tso must come up with a way to stop the terrorism without killing God.
By Melissa Scott First Published: 1996 The tale of a complex society that explore humanity’s far future through the eyes of Ista Kelly. A young foundling and the sole survivor of a pirate raid on an asteroid mine, Ista lives in world where one cannot live without an official identity and she has none. This is the story of Ista’s harrowing journey back to the…
By Melissa Scott First Published: 1993 In Burning Bright, Scott tells a passionate, colorful tale of love and death, her best yet. Setting her tale on the free-port planet of Burning Bright, nexus of trade, politically balanced between the human and Hsai empires in space, and center of virtual-reality-gaming for all of civilization, Scott weaves a network of intrigue and suspense. When spacepilot and ambitious…
By Laura J. Mixon First Published: 2002 More than a hundred years after a small band of humans stole an antimatter-fueled starship and headed away at near-lightspeed, a colony of those renegades’ descendants are now struggling to survive on Brimstone, a barely-habitable world of ice and bitter cold four dozen light-years from Earth. In the long run, they hope to slowly terraform Brimstone, making it,…
By Laura J. Mixon First Published: 1998 In a near-future Southwest sizzling under the effects of global warming, a top-secret project blends the latest advances in biotechnology and brain-to-machine interfaces to create human-shaped machines that are guided by faraway pilots, or proxies. Carli D’Auber, who has invented a new form of communication that enables people to transfer their consciousness thousands of miles away, finds herself…
By Laura J. Mixon First Published: 1992 When Ruby, the proprietor of an android business, and Golem, her favorite android, attempt to save a rich Egyptian from a collapsing skyscraper, they instead become deeply involved in an adventure that could take Ruby to the despised Outside.
By Ken MacLeod First Published: 1995 Moh Kohn is a security mercenary, his smart gun and killer reflexes for hire. Janis Taine is a scientist working on memory-enhancing drugs, fleeing the US/UN’s technology cops. Jordan Brown is a teenager in the Christian enclave of Beulah City, dealing in theologically-correct software for the world’s fundamentalists-and wants out. In a Balkanized twenty-first century, where the “peace process”…
By James Luceno First Published: 2002 WELCOME TO VIRTUAL REALITY IN CYBERSPACE . . . WHERE EVERYTHING’S REAL–INCLUDING DEATH. Teenage misfits Marz and Tech are just two more orphaned brothers in New York, but they only live there. In the boys’ real world, the dazzling cybernetic metropolis known as Virtual Network, they are cybersleuths, genius hackers, and a cut above the best in Extreme Sports Racing. There…
By James Luceno First Published: 1995 CYBERSPACE—THE REAL FINAL FRONTIER… The place: New York City. The time: any day now. Tech and Marz are brothers, orphans, and misfits just about everywhere—except on the Virtual Network, where their monster gaming skills leave challengers choking on their datatrails; and their hacking expertise earns them serious cash as freelance cyber-sleuths, running down lost information and missing persons on…
By James Luceno First Published: 1993 The sole survivor of a failed intelligence mission, cyber-enhanced man Aksum Muse takes refuge on the planet Burst but finds himself to be the unwitting key to a coming stellar war.
By William Gibson First Published: 1999 Rating: Very good. Colin Laney, sensitive to patterns of information like no one else on earth, currently resides in a cardboard box in Tokyo. His body shakes with fever dreams, but his mind roams free as always, and he knows something is about to happen. Not in Tokyo; he will not see this thing himself. Something is about to…
By William Gibson First Published: 1996 1st century Tokyo, after the millennial quake. Neon rain. Light everywhere blowing under any door you might try to close. Where the New Buildings, the largest in the world, erect themselves unaided, their slow rippling movements like the contractions of a sea-creature… Colin Laney is here looking for work. He is an intuitive fisher for patterns of information, the…
By William Gibson First Published: 1993 Rating: Classic. 2005: Welcome to NoCal and SoCal, the uneasy sister-states of what used to be California. The millennium has come and gone, leaving in its wake only stunned survivors. In Los Angeles, Berry Rydell is a former armed-response rentacop now working for a bounty hunter. Chevette Washington is a bicycle messenger turned pickpocket who impulsively snatches a pair…
By Ian McDonald First Published: 1992 For almost 30, 000 years The Land has been a dependency of The Empire Across The River. The Empire retains a mechanistic technology in the hands of the wealthy and the civil service, but The Land uses its dead, whose brains are linked to a massive data network.
By Ian McDonald First Published: 1992 Grandfather was a tree, Father grew trux, in fifteen colours. Mother could sing the double-helix song, sing it right into the hearts of living things and change them… The Land is a living, breathing, sentient world, where careful skills and talent can manipulate its very substance into a myriad different shapes and forms. This is the world in which…
By Ian McDonald First Published: 1994 Ethan Ring is a former graphic design student with a dark and powerful secret. As an undergraduate, he and some classmates developed the ultimate in high-concept visual art: computerized images capable of bypassing rational thought and controlling the mind of the perceiver, whether for good or ill. When the reigning intelligence agency gets wind of Ethan’s handiwork, he is…
By Ian McDonald First Published: 1994 It is a few decades after a revolutionary technology has given humans the ability to resurrect the dead. The ever-increasing population of the risen dead is segregated into areas called necrovilles. Here they have created a wild culture, untouched by the restrictions of the law – except that the dead cannot stray into the realm of the living, nor…
By Ian McDonald First Published:1994 It’s the Second of November 2063. It’s the Day of the Dead. In the 21st Century, nanotechnology has revolutionized the laws of birth and death. The resurrected dead account for almost one third of the human population, and the backbone of its workplace. They have their own culture and their own ghettos, the Necrovilles. And the Day of the Dead…
By Marianne De Pierres First Published: 2004 Rating: Excellent. The Tert–a toxic strip of humanity outside the city limits–is no longer big enough for bodyguard Parrish Plessis and her sadistic boss, Jamon Mondo. So with Mondo’s dingoboys on her tail, Parrish cuts a deal with a rival gang lord to steal some files that could send Mondo to death row. At the same time, she’s…
Rudy Rucker: First Published: 1994 “Reads like a ripped-from-Reddit romp of white hat hacking, artificial intelligence run amok, and an unstoppable electronic bugs.” A very modern nightmare: The most destructive computer virus ever has been traced to your machine. Computer programmer Jerzy Rugby spends his days blissfully hacking away in cyberspace – aiding the GoMotion Corporation in its noble quest to create intelligent robots. Then…
By Shale Aaron First Published: 1999 Celebrity Lydia Melmoth is a Death Artist – she died 7 times before she was 18, still the world record. Unwilling to subject herself to another brush with death , she has retires from her career as a near-death experience performer. That is, until her mother’s pressuring Lydia into making a comeback. Mom needs. A lot of it. For…
By Tom Cool First Published: 1996 Rating: Very Good. Arabella, war-name Infectress, is beautiful, smart and sexy–and she has a solution to the world’s overpopulation problem. She’s a high-tech terrorist who intends to hack human DNA to create a supervirus: New Age Dawn. It will kill 98% of humanity. But Special Agent Diane Jamison is on her trail. Infectress needs to elude Jamison while she…
Mark Fabi First Published: 1997 As the new millennium approaches, cults, sects, and crackpot prophets flood the worldwide media. But for Michael Arcangelo none of their catastrophe theories are more frightening than the Goodknight virus. Michael suspects it is the work of a mysterious programming genius, who designed it to create a computer role-playing game so real it can kill. Now Michael and his team…
By Garth Nix First Published: 1997 Rating: Excellent. “If you’re lucky, you live to fight another day.” In a futuristic urban wasteland, evil Overlords have decreed that no human shall live a day past their 14th birthday. On that Sad Birthday, the children of the Dorms are taken to the Meat Factory, where they will be made into creatures whose sole purpose is to kill.…